The Winter Soldiers: The Battles for Trenton and Princeton

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CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

CHAPTER I

1. A Gentleman from England with Genius in His Eyes

2. The River Is Passed, and the Bridge Cut Away

3. A Business of Necessity

CHAPTER II

1. We Must Tax Them

2. America Will Be Brought to Submission

3. Everyone Who Does Not Agree with Me Is a Traitor

4. It Was the War of the People

5. A Full Exertion of Great Force

CHAPTER III

1. A Mere Insidious Maneuvre

2. The Troops Were in High Spirits

3. A Citadel Within Reach

4. Ye Should Never Fight Against Yer King

5. The Rebels Fled Like Scared Rabbits

CHAPTER IV

1. These Things Raise the Heads of the Tories

2. The Times That Try Men’s Souls

3. The Campaign Having Closed

4. The Game Is Pretty Near Up

5. A Most Miraculous Event

CHAPTER V

1. We Have Not Slept One Night in Peace

2. The Snow Was Tinged with Blood

3. I Wanted the Victory Complete

4. The Army Was in the Most Desperate Situation

CHAPTER VI

1. We’ll Bag Him in the Morning

2. It Seemed to Strike an Awe upon Us

3. Not a Man but Showed Joy

4. A Time of Shaking

5. Not an Enemy in the Jersies

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

By Richard M. Ketchum

Copyright

Maps

Scene of Operations around New York, 1776

The Battle for Fort Washington, November 16, 1776

Scene of Operations in New Jersey, 1776

The Attack on Trenton, December 25–26, 1776

Second Battle of Trenton, January 2, 1777, and the March to Princeton, January 3, 1777

The Battle of Princeton, January 3, 1777

for Liza, Casey, and Tom

CHAPTER ONE

1. A Gentleman from England with Genius in His Eyes

In the raw, unsightly camps west of the Hudson the American army was in trouble. Early in October 1776 a New York militia colonel who suffered with the name of Ann Hawkes Hay poured out his problem to Peter Livingston, the president of the New York Convention in Fishkill. Almost half of his regiment at Haverstraw, Hay reported, lacked weapons and he wondered what in the world he should do or where he could look for reinforcements if the enemy attempted a landing there. He was short of money to pay his men and a few days earlier he had been unable to collect more than thirty-eight of them together, even after repeated summons to duty. Several British cutters had sailed upriver and fired at the shore, damaging Hay’s own house and taking away a piece of the hat he was wearing, but despite this real and present danger his soldiers complained that if they left their farms their families would starve; there had been no opportunity to harvest corn or buckwheat and they had been so busy all summer with what Hay called the publick troubles that there had not been time to sow winter grain. Worse yet, some of them felt that the Congress in Philadelphia had done the country no favor by rejecting the British government’s overtures for reconciliation; all his men cared about, Hay said, was peace, liberty, and safety, and if they could only have that, they would be content.

When Hay took his griefs to Major General Nathanael Greene, who commanded Fort Lee on the crest of the New Jersey Palisades, Greene considered them worrisome enough to bring to the attention of the commander in chief, George Washington, even though he intended to settle the matter himself. Greene was an independence man through and through, and he made it clear to Hay that he had no patience with the men’s grousing. If they didn’t follow orders, Hay should send them down to Fort Lee, where Greene would see that they did.

Actually, Greene had a morale problem too. The number of men stationed near the fort varied anywhere from 200 to 2,000, and the presence of that many additional people in a farm community was bound to create friction. When Lieutenant Joseph Hodgkins of the Massachusetts Line wrote to his wife on September 30, he said that he had been in the area for ten days and would be glad to stay longer: I have been at the trouble of building a log house with a stone chimney, he told her. I got it fit to live in three days ago, before which I had not lodged on anything but the ground. The difficulty was that those logs, like many others that had gone into soldiers’ huts, came from one of the nearby farms. In this neighborhood the fences were laid up French style, five rails high, one on top of another, and nothing could be handier for building. A farmer named Peter Bourdet, whose rocky, wooded land had been cleared for the construction of Fort Lee during the summer, complained that the fences around 125 acres of his pasture had been torn down by the troops and that he had lost three acres of corn and four of flax and oats as well. A lot of the soldiers were sick and so many more were deserting that Hugh Mercer, who was in charge of a mobile reserve known as the Flying Camp, near Perth Amboy, doubted if Washington could muster five thousand dependable troops. He feared the worst if the poorly armed, badly disciplined militiamen he had seen, who were perpetually fluctuating between the camp and their farms, had to face General William Howe’s British veterans.

Yet, as George Washington assured his old friend Mercer, it was not entirely the men’s fault; after all, Men who have been free, and subject to no control, cannot be reduced to order in an instant. All this confusion was the natural result of inexperience, and inexperience was what the Continental Army seemed to have most of in the fall of 1776. It had been in existence for little more than a year and as yet few soldiers had any real training or knowledge of military matters, and their officers were not much better off. Mercer, who was now a brigadier general, had been a physician in Fredericksburg, Virginia, until a year before. Nathanael Greene, who had served in a Providence, Rhode Island, militia company, had seen no active service until May of 1775. And eighteen months later, as he tried to cope with the never-ending series of problems involving the troops, Greene began to wonder if there would ever be any leisure time in which to reflect upon matters of great importance when he had to devote so many hours to paper work. It was this that confines my thoughts as well as engrosses my time, he grumbled. It is like a merchandise of small wares. Fortunately, within the past month Greene had found someone to help him with letters and reports, and a highly unusual aide-de-camp he was. The Rhode Island officer’s reputation for impulsiveness didn’t fully explain his choice of an Englishman who had been in the colonies for less than two years, who was also a civilian with no military experience. But Greene was desperate for help and he was undoubtedly pleased to acquire a staff member who was one of the most celebrated figures in America.

The new arrival had spent some time in Philadelphia, where he had impressed a number of people, including one of the Massachusetts delegates to the Continental Congress, John Adams. His name is Paine, Adams wrote to a friend, a gentleman about two years from England—a man who, General Lee says, has genius in his eyes. Genius might be there, but what was more quickly apparent behind the dark, penetrating eyes, beaked nose, and a sensuous mouth that threatened to break into a grin at any moment was an impression that the fellow was looking through you, probing to see what was there. It was not easy to be comfortable in the presence of this Paine.

If ever there was a case of an individual and an idea that came together at the right moment, Thomas Paine was it. He had been driven to the New World by a succession of personal failures and a festering hatred for the society which had brought them about. The son of a poor Thetford corset maker, he had picked up a rudimentary education before going to work for his father as an apprentice staymaker—an occupation he disliked so intensely that he ran away from home at sixteen, went to sea, and served aboard a privateer in the Seven Years’ War. Sick of that, he jumped ship and turned up in London, to work at various jobs—staymaker, cobbler, cabinetmaker, tax collector, along with brief sallies into other fields, always skating on the thin edge of defeat, barely avoiding debtors’ prison. His first marriage, to a servant girl, ended with his wife’s death a year later; a second ended in separation. Like so many other Englishmen, Paine was a victim of enclosure laws enacted two centuries earlier which had remorselessly forced thousands of small farmers off the land and into the cities. There the luckier, more adaptable ones formed the nucleus of a working class for the industries beginning to spring up in English towns. The less fortunate turned to begging or thieving or worse: in the streets of London Tom Paine witnessed every form of human degradation—murder, drunkenness, brutality, starvation. Not a day passed, he said, but that he saw ragged and hungry children, and persons of seventy and eighty years of age, begging in the streets. Workers were reduced to serfs, a rigid, inequitable class system marked men for life, and the lower classes were brutalized by a savage criminal code that would hang a ten-year-old boy for stealing a penknife or permit women to be stoned to death in the pillory. Epidemics of disease were a commonplace in the vile, stinking slums; infant mortality was unbelievably high; and with death its handmaiden, life was cheap. Somehow or other, Paine managed to stay afloat in the murky cesspool of lower-class London; somehow he wangled an introduction to the famous Benjamin Franklin and obtained a letter of recommendation from the American ambassador extraordinary; and somehow he left England in October 1774, bound for a new land and a new tomorrow.

Writing to his son-in-law, Richard Bache, Franklin described the Englishman as an ingenious worthy young man who might make a clerk, or assistant tutor in a school, or assistant surveyor. Through Bache’s efforts Paine found employment with Robert Aitken, a Philadelphia printer and bookseller who had started a publication called The Pennsylvania Magazine. By the time Paine got around to writing his thanks to Franklin three months after his arrival in America, he was able to inform his benefactor that he was the editor of the publication and that circulation had risen from 600 to 1,500 under his stewardship. Paine, it was clear, had a keen ear for what was going on around him; the Philadelphians he met treated him as a sounding board, for he was a recently arrived Englishman to whom they could pour out their grievances over government policy, a man eager to discuss ideas and to sop up the best of them like a sponge.

The London years had left an abiding mark on Paine, a nagging conscience that would make him speak out again and again for the oppressed, and one of the first articles he wrote for the magazine was an attack on the institution that was already beginning to trouble thoughtful Americans. Called African Slavery in America, it brought him to the attention of Dr. Benjamin Rush, the prominent young physician and reformer. Soon Rush was urging Paine to turn his mind to the matter of independence from Britain (even in 1775 the doctor’s profession and connections prevented him from coming forward personally as a spokesman in that controversy), but Paine hesitated to use the pages of the magazine in this way; for one thing, Aitken was too timid to risk offending his conservative subscribers; for another, Paine himself—like most native Americans—believed that the differences between the colonies and the mother country could still be reconciled. Or so he thought until events outside Boston on April 19, 1775, persuaded him that all plans, proposals, etc. to patch up the quarrel were like the almanacks of the last year; which though proper then, are superceded and useless now. In the months following the battles at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill, when George Washington of Virginia was appointed commander in chief of the colonial army and the British forces sat sullenly in Boston besieged by a ragtag mob of New England farmers and tradesmen, Paine found it increasingly difficult to understand how a war could be going on in Massachusetts while Pennsylvania and the other colonies were so little affected.

John Wesley Jarvis’ portrait of Thomas Paine caught the intensity of the man whose writings possessed such concentrated fury, but there is little here to support the description of the pamphleteer in later years as loathsome in his appearance. John Adams thought him a genius, but distrusted him and called Common Sense too democratical.

(National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)

When Tom Paine had landed in America on November 30, 1774, the long-simmering dispute between England and her possessions in North America was coming to a head—a situation made to order for a passionate, articulate man who was also an uncompromising zealot. Sensing that the country was already set on fire about my ears, he decided it was time to stir. Even if Americans did not realize that the moment for action was nigh, the expatriate Englishman did, for as he perceived the situation, Those who had been long settled had something to defend; those who had just come had something to pursue. Here he found few of the class distinctions that so divided England; here the abundance of land had produced a class of independent farmers; here merchants and planters—men of some wealth—who had felt themselves exploited and excluded by Britain’s colonial policies, were aligning themselves politically with the farmers and tradesmen. And, as it happened, Paine’s arrival coincided with a period of almost unbearable tension: five months after he began work in Philadelphia fighting broke out between the colonists and the king’s troops. Into this tinderbox Tom Paine tossed a spark that turned a disorganized rebellion into the overthrow of an entire social and political system. Through the summer and early fall of 1775, Paine turned his mind increasingly to the idea of independence, and on October 18 he published an article called A Serious Thought, in which he spoke out boldly for separation from England. In December he asked Benjamin Rush to read a draft of a pamphlet he had written, and Rush urged him to show it to Franklin, Samuel Adams, and David Rittenhouse, three staunch friends to American independence. Paine’s employer, Robert Aitken, refused to publish the manuscript, which was too incendiary for his taste, but a small printer named Robert Bell was persuaded to do so, and on January 10, 1776, the fifty-page pamphlet appeared. Rush had suggested that Paine call it Common Sense.

The argument between government and the governed had gone on for so long and with such increasing vehemence that it is hard to realize how few Americans had reached the stage of advocating separation from England. Yet in March 1775 Benjamin Franklin—who probably knew as much about the attitudes of his countrymen as anyone—could assure William Pitt, now Earl of Chatham, that he had never heard in any conversation from any person drunk or sober the least expression of a wish for separation or hint that such a thing would be advantageous to America. With the exception of a few radicals in the colonies (who knew better than to risk losing moderate support by advocating independence), no one took the idea very seriously. Even after blood was shed at Lexington and Concord; even after the grisly business at Bunker Hill, which made it virtually certain that a war of some kind would be fought; even after the Continental Congress had created an army and appointed a commanding general, there was still no real ground swell for separation. In August 1775 Thomas Jefferson stated that he was looking with fondness towards a reconciliation with Great Britain, adding that he would rather be in dependence on Great Britain, properly limited, than on any nation on earth, or on no nation. And the following January the Maryland Convention took a firm stand against independence, citing the experience we and our ancestors have had of the mildness and equity of the English Constitution, under which we have grown up to and enjoyed a state of felicity not exceeded by any people we know of. Americans on the whole were not thinking seriously of independence; they were also loyal to their king, whom they considered a benevolent man who would do right by America if it were not for his advisers. Colonial wrath took the form of animosity to George III’s ministers, those enemies to the freedom of the human race, like so many Master devils in the infernal regions.

What altered the situation so drastically was the sudden, widespread acceptance of the ideas put forward in Common Sense. Paine was not the first man to call for independence, but he did so at the critical moment, in words that precisely suited the passions of the hour. Common Sense gave tongue to the innermost thoughts of men in every colony—merchant and farmer, lawyer, soldier, delegate to the Continental Congress. Shockingly and with unheard-of daring, Paine attacked King George as a hardened, sullen-tempered Pharaoh and the Royal Brute of Great Britain. He assailed the very principle of hereditary monarchy, proclaimed the need for separation of mother country and colonies, denounced the British ruling group for exploiting the lower classes in America and England alike, and urged the colonists to declare their independence and make their land a refuge for Europe’s downtrodden. Not only did Paine appeal to the American liberal; realizing that he must attract conservatives to the cause, he argued that independence would make it possible for the colonies to remain aloof from Europe’s wars, take advantage of its beckoning markets, and obtain foreign aid. Since the founding of Jamestown there had been fifteen conflicts in which—with few exceptions—the great powers had participated, an average of one war every generation, and the American colonists had been drawn willy-nilly into these European struggles for trade and empire. Europe is too thickly planted with kingdoms to be long at peace, Paine warned his readers, "and whenever a war breaks out between England and any foreign power, the trade of America goes to ruin, because of her connection with Britain … Everything that is right or reasonable pleads for separation. The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, ’Tis time to party."

Offering his adopted countrymen a vision of what the future might hold, Paine assured them that the sun never shined on a cause of greater worth. ’Tis not the affair of a city, a county, a province, or a kingdom; but of a continent—of at least one-eighth part of the habitable globe. ’Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected even to the end of time by the proceedings now. Now is the seedtime of continental union, faith, and honor. Considering the relatively primitive state of communications, there was something almost magical about the speed with which the revolutionary call to arms flew across the colonies. Paine, who gave the money due him as the author’s share to charity and even printed 6,000 at his own expense, said the pamphlet sold 120,000 copies within three months; others estimated that half a million were printed. Since there were no copyright laws, pirated editions appeared everywhere; there were even translations into German, French, and Dutch. In terms of the proportionate population it reached, Common Sense was the greatest best seller ever published in America—a book exactly appropriate for its particular moment in time. Where others had set men to thinking in abstract terms about freedom, Tom Paine called them to action, urging them to fight for liberty. His arguments were simple, impassioned, and cast in the homely terms every American could understand. Quoting extensively from the Old Testament, Paine reminded men of the words that had thundered down from colonial pulpits; he preached logic and common sense while appealing to the passions and to prejudice.

From Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the army was encamped at the time, George Washington wrote to his friend Joseph Reed, predicting that the sound doctrine and unanswerable reasoning of ‘Common Sense’ will not leave numbers at a loss to decide upon the propriety of a separation. Two months later he informed Reed that letters from Virginia indicated that Paine’s message was working a powerful change there in the minds of men. There were, as expected, heated attacks on the pamphlet by those who remained loyal to king and Parliament; but by late spring of 1776 the effects of Common Sense were evident everywhere, in the swelling tide of public feeling that moved inexorably toward independence.

2. The River Is Passed, and the Bridge Cut Away

With pomp and solemn pageant, Parliament had opened at Westminster on October 26, 1775. His Majesty George III, seated on the throne in his crown and regal ornaments, addressed the members of both Houses in words that left no doubt as to his intentions. The harsh, uncompromising tone of the speech was set in his opening remarks, in an angry attack on those Americans who had inflamed his colonial subjects by gross misrepresentations and by infusing in their minds a system of opinions repugnant to the true constitution of the Colonies, so that they now openly avow their revolt, hostility, and rebellion. As the M.P. William Innes declared after hearing the king speak, the ringleaders of this mischief in North America were few in number, and if they could only be got hold of they deserved no mercy. Once they were out of the way it should be a simple matter to convince the lower class in America that the liberty those people were so fond of talking about could not compare with what they already enjoyed under the British Constitution.

What neither the king nor the M.P. comprehended was that not all of the dissidents in America were of the same stripe. In fact, the reverse was true: George III might lump them together and call them rash, violent demagogues, but with the exception of a few men like Samuel Adams of Boston and Patrick Henry of Virginia, the emerging political leaders in America were prudent, judicious, and sincerely concerned about where their actions might lead. Had the king been more attentive, he might have seen that the radical movement, between 1770 and 1773, was in danger of being ignored to death by the vast majority of colonists; only after the Boston Tea Party did the radicals succeed in persuading the major colonies to send representatives to an assembly known as the First Continental Congress, where their mutual grievances were discussed.

Before Common Sense crystallized a large segment of public opinion, representatives to the Second Continental Congress had declared the necessity of taking up arms and had created an army and navy, yet at the same time they were continuing to petition London for reconciliation. This apparent ambiguity reflected to some extent the general fear of what democratic ideas might produce once they were unleashed. The word democracy had a different connotation in those days—it suggested civil disorder and mob rule, the kind of rowdiness so evident in annual celebrations of the Boston massacre, to men like the Reverend Andrew Eliot, who fretted about the many inconveniences which would attend frequent popular elections. John Dickinson, who had studied law in England, felt the same way. And what worried him was that reforms were unlikely to be achieved through moderation. Beyond such vague fears, however, what most troubled thoughtful men in the colonies was the very nature of the imperial relationship with Britain, especially as it concerned the peculiar nature of America’s political structure.

At the time the colonies were founded, British institutions of government had been imported and reproduced in miniature; but whereas in the mother country those institutions had been modified and expanded to meet the needs of changing times, in the colonies they had tended to move in the opposite direction—to contract and be simplified, to drift toward a more medieval form of local representation. Town and county governing bodies had little reason to identify with the embracing imperial structure; representatives serving in them voiced local concerns rather than the problems of empire. Local agencies maintained order, local courts administered justice, local governments made the laws that circumscribed daily life. And most important, the colonial assemblies exercised the power of taxation and had done so for as long as men could recall with no interference or competition from Parliament. So government in the American possessions had come to be a highly decentralized, parochial arrangement, functioning within a loose framework known as the empire with a kind of mystical attachment to it based on loyalty to a distant regal authority.

The attitude of the First Continental Congress had been clearly expressed by John Dickinson, a polite, advertent lawyer from Philadelphia. Dickinson maintained that British sovereignty over the colonies must be limited, that a line must be drawn to distinguish parliamentary authority from that of the colonial assemblies. In this view, London would control the colonies’ commercial and foreign affairs, while jurisdiction over internal matters—including, most especially, taxation—remained the exclusive right of provincial legislatures. (The king and his ministers, as might be expected, agreed with Dr. Samuel Johnson’s pronouncement that in sovereignty there are no gradations.) For a decade and more, along the sparsely settled coast of British North America, farmers, artisans, scholars, merchants, and professional men had been wrestling conscientiously with this fundamental issue of sovereignty, a word whose meaning was shaded by questions relating to proper representation, the consent of the governed, the inherent rights of individuals, and the nature of compacts between men. These Americans were acutely aware of the role that power played in human affairs; the location and use of power in government, they realized, lay behind all political issues. What gave it such overriding importance in their view was that the natural victims of power gone wrong were liberty and law—in short, the rights of man. Power in itself was not evil; indeed, it was a condition of the contracts mutually agreed to by subject and sovereign for men’s governance. The trouble was that men in authority tend to accumulate more power and to misuse it to the point where liberty, as John Adams phrased it, might only be found at last skulking about in corners … hunted and persecuted. And liberty, Adams wrote, can no more exist without virtue and independence than the body can live and move without a soul. This was an attitude that had convinced many political thinkers that there was something quite special about America. What was at stake here, they believed, was far more than the cause of a mob or a faction—it was the cause of the liberties of mankind.

Take, for instance, the question of slavery.

At first, these colonial philosophers had talked much of slavery—by which they meant the plight of men tyrannized by government, as when they were taxed without their own consent. Slavery was the ultimate political degradation, and a man was better off to dine on a turnip and be a free man, a Massachusetts pamphleteer declared, than to live in luxury and be a slave. But inevitably this kind of discussion led to another set of considerations altogether—to the realities of the enslaved black population in their midst and to the contradictions thus made manifest between principles of freedom professed theoretically on the one hand and the harsh facts of life on the other. As the Virginian Patrick Henry saw it, the general inconvenience of living here without them made the freeing of slaves impractical in the southern colonies, yet it was impossible to ignore the contradiction implicit in maintaining the peculiar institution at a time when the rights of humanity are defined and understood with precision in a country above all others fond of liberty. And the fiery James Otis asked, Does it follow that ’tis right to enslave a man because he is black? Will short curled hair like wool instead of Christian hair … help the argument? The slave trade was a shocking violation of the law of nature, he stated, which diminished the value of liberty and makes every dealer in it a tyrant. So those local governing bodies, the colonial assemblies, had begun to take matters into their own hands on this, along with other vital questions. The Massachusetts assembly in 1774 had voted to abolish the slave trade (a decision negated by veto of the royal governor); Rhode Island, declaring that those who are desirous of enjoying all the advantages of liberty themselves should be willing to extend personal liberty to others, ruled that any slaves imported into the colony would be freed; Connecticut did likewise; Delaware prohibited importation; and Pennsylvania taxed the slave trade out of existence.

If there was seeming agreement on certain issues in the thirteen colonies, it had been a long time coming. For more than a century the British dominions in North America had been divided into a number of small, detached jurisdictions. Individual colonies were isolated from each other by an administrative system controlled from England and by differences of background, economic interest, and social and religious persuasion as well. Southerners regarded New Englanders as rascally sharpers; northern farmers and traders considered the planters loose-living infidels; boundary disputes set one region against another; while their separate trade with England drew each closer to the mother country than to its immediate neighbors. An English visitor to the colonies at the time of George III’s accession to the throne found that fire and water are not more heterogeneous than the different colonies in North America … In short, such is the difference of character, of manners, of religion, of interest [that] were they left to themselves, there would soon be a civil war from one end of the continent to the other; while the Indians and negroes would, with better reason, impatiently watch the opportunity of exterminating them all together. Peopled by prickly dissenters, the colonies were jealous of each other and seemed quite incapable of uniting for any common purpose. Indeed, even when their lives and homes were threatened, as they had been in the French and Indian War, the governor of Pennsylvania observed that, to their shame, they refused at the time of General Braddock’s defeat to contribute to the defense of their country by establishing a militia or furnishing men, money, or provisions.

Despite all their differences, circumstances had begun to unite a growing number of colonists who found that they had similar views about many things. In part this was the result of improving communications: the postal system (established by the mother country) had made them more aware of each other’s existence when like-minded men in different parts of the country began corresponding; merchant vessels coasting along the Atlantic seaboard from one port to another established friendly connections; newspapers and pamphlets circulated from one colony to the next; stages rattling over a growing network of roads bore ideas along with their passengers. And at the same time, the policies of George III and his ministers had succeeded in fraying the fragile strands that tied the separate colonies to the government in London. Affection for the mother country deteriorated with each new restrictive measure that was enacted, while provincial isolation and sectional differences began to be submerged in a growing concern over larger matters.

In the spring of 1776, while Paine’s little pamphlet circulated through America spreading the contagion of independence, it began to appear that there was little hope of ever reconciling colonial views with those of the government. The ministry in London had closed off New England’s fisheries, colonial trade came to a standstill, American ships were seized by the Royal Navy, and there were ugly, recurring reports that George III was seeking military assistance in the form of Russian and German mercenaries to suppress the uprising in the colonies. It was said that Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, was intriguing with Indians to attack the frontier and was holding secret meetings with Negro slaves urging them to cut their masters’ throats. Suspicion and rumor fed on the growing distrust of government, while the rush of events was putting independence men in the saddle locally. For although conservatives in the Continental Congress might continue to oppose independence, the fact was that the colonies were fighting an undeclared war with England. Canada had been invaded by troops under Richard Montgomery and Benedict Arnold, George Washington’s motley army had forced the British troops to evacuate Boston, and Congress had issued letters of marque to privateers. In May Congress suggested that the colonial assemblies decide whether they should establish governments whose authority derived from the people rather than the king. (This step was thought necessary since George III had excluded the colonists from the protection of his crown, had given them no answer to petitions for redress of their grievances, and had made known his intention of exerting the whole force of his Kingdom, aided by foreign mercenaries … for the destruction of the good people of these Colonies.) A secret committee of Congress had sent out feelers for a French alliance, dispatching Silas Deane* to ferret out the attitude of the Comte de Vergennes, France’s foreign minister. Yet for some reason, despite all this unbridled activity, Congress continued to drag its feet on the central issue of separation from England.

It was increasingly apparent that the militants who controlled most colonial assemblies had run out of patience with irresolution in Philadelphia and that they were going to force the move toward independence if Congress did not. As Joseph Hawley wrote to the Boston delegate, Sam Adams, The People are now ahead of you and the only way to prevent discord and dissension is to strike while the iron is hot. The Peoples blood is too Hot to admit of delays— All will be in confusion if independence is not declared immediately. The Tories take courage and Many Whiggs begin to be chagrined… What is our Congress about? Hawley wished to know; it seemed to be on dead center, dozing and dreaming and waiting for commissioners to arrive from England to discuss an accommodation. Charles Lee, a former British officer who had embraced the rebel cause, told Richard Henry Lee, a Virginia delegate, If you do not declare immediately for positive independence, we are all ruined. There is a poorness of spirit and languor in the late proceedings of Congress, that I confess frightens me so much that at times I regret having embarked my all, my fortune, life, and reputation, in their bottom. I sometimes wish I had settled in some country of slaves, where the most lenient master governs.

Typical of what was happening in the back country were the deliberations of a group of citizens from Buckingham County, Virginia. A state convention had been summoned to discuss this problem of establishing new governments, and representatives of the county had come together to determine how they would instruct their delegates. The conclusions they reached indicated how far the Virginians had moved toward the idea of separation from England. Enumerating their grievances, they stated flatly that the root of the trouble was lack of confidence in the government; it had been annihilated, they said, and there was no prospect of restoring it. What these Buckingham County men found so distressing was that the loyalty they once felt toward their king (a loyalty admittedly washed with wishful thinking) had been destroyed by George III’s own speeches; clearly he was not the dupe of ministers or Parliament, as they had formerly believed. So the delegates, Charles Patteson and John Cabell, were advised to keep their minds firmly fixed on the primary object of independence and not lose themselves in hankering after reconciliation. As far as your voices will contribute, they were told, use them to cause a total and final separation from Great Britain, to take place as soon as possible. What Buckingham County wanted was a free and happy constitution … with a renunciation of the old, and so much thereof as has been found inconvenient and oppressive. Then, voicing a hope that was in the minds of so many Americans, their instructions touched on the matter of foreign assistance. No other nation was likely to intercede as long as the quarrel remained in the family, between subject and subject, but if the idea of reconciliation were abandoned and the colonies bid the last adieu to England, then some foreign powers may, for their own interest, lend an assisting hand, settle a trade, and enable us to discharge the great burdens of the war, which otherwise may become intolerable. On May 15, 1776, at Williamsburg, Patteson, Cabell, and other spokesmen for the most powerful and populous colony passed a unanimous resolution in favor of independence.

The capital, accustomed to the presence of a royal governor and the trappings of empire, was capable of laying on a highly acceptable pageant when occasion warranted, and this was clearly one of those times. A week after the historic vote, independence sympathizers in Williamsburg turned out to celebrate. The train of artillery rumbled onto a field beyond the powder magazine, where gun crews put on a smart display of loading and firing a proper salute; militia companies stepped out on parade to a brisk rattle of drums and tootle of fifes; and a Continental union flag was hoisted over the austere capitol—thirteen red and white stripes, with the crosses of St. George and St. Andrew on a blue canton, shimmering in the May breeze. At day’s end, in the deepening twilight, the windows of houses all over town suddenly glowed with light—first one, then another, then two or three more—until the sides of the streets were bathed with soft yellow candlelight. It was the housewives’ own offering to the brave new world.

While their fellow Virginians were congratulating themselves, two delegates to the Continental Congress—Richard Henry Lee and Thomas Jefferson—were doing their utmost to force Congress to act. What stood in the way was the middle colonies—Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, particularly—which, as Lee grumbled, certainly obstruct and perplex the American Machine. Despite mounting evidence that substantial numbers of people were leaning toward a break (Every Post and every Day rolls in upon Us Independence like a Torrent, John Adams exclaimed), the cautious members from the middle colonies procrastinated and temporized, arguing that the time was not ripe for severing the British connection. But in the early summer of 1776 their backs were to the wall. Led by John Dickinson of Maryland and James Wilson of Pennsylvania, and James Duane and John Jay of New York, the moderates were forced to make a stand when Lee introduced a resolution on June 7 at the urging of Virginia’s state convention that the united Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States. Conservatives called for postponement of the vote on this critical matter; they had no authority to decide on such a resolution, they said, and—in what proved a final show of strength—won a delay until July 1. As it turned out, postponement was fatal; on June 14, Connecticut and Delaware instructed their delegates to vote for independence; New Hampshire and New Jersey followed; and on June 28, Maryland had a change of heart.

After Lee’s resolution was put off, and before the five other colonies came into line, Congress appointed a committee of five to draft a declaration of independence, naming John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman as members. The committee decided to give the job of writing the statement to Jefferson, one of the youngest and newest members of Congress, who was already well known for his views on colonial rights. He also had a reputation, a fellow delegate wrote, for literature, science, and a happy talent for composition, and his peculiar felicity of expression was thought suited to the task at hand. Tom Paine’s friend, Dr. Benjamin Rush, regarded Jefferson as a genius of the first order, knowledgeable about many subjects, and not only the friend of his country, but of all nations and religions. By rights, since Richard Henry Lee was the ranking member of the Virginia delegation and had introduced the resolution calling for independence, he should have been assigned to the drafting committee. But Lee was not popular among the congressmen; some of them regarded him as self-seeking and vain (it was rumored that he practiced gestures in front of a mirror before giving the speeches for which he was famous), and in any case, Lee wanted to return home on personal business, so Jefferson was named in his stead. John Adams liked to tell why the Virginian, and not he, had been appointed to draft the document. As he explained it to Jefferson, Reason first—You are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason second—I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. Reason third—You can write ten times better than I can.

Jefferson was now thirty-three, well over six feet tall, slim and erect, with reddish hair and a tendency to freckle. He had inherited a considerable estate from his father and had increased it through marriage. Insatiably curious, he had taken a classical education at William and Mary and for five years studied law with the most notable legal mind in Virginia, George Wythe. In 1775, when he was sent to Congress as a substitute for Peyton Randolph, the members noticed a certain shyness about him, for he seldom spoke in debate.

In the growing heat of summer, Jefferson spent his days in the house of a young bricklayer named Graff, at the corner of Market and Seventh streets. There were few other buildings in the neighborhood, which led Jefferson to think he might benefit from the freely circulating air there. The lodger had the second floor to himself—bedroom, parlor, and connecting passage—and at times he evidently broke his routine of writing by playing with Graff’s infant son, who was told years afterward that he had been dandled on the great man’s knee. Working in the parlor at a little portable writing desk he had designed for his own use, Jefferson seems not to have been bothered by the lack of a library; he said that he turned to no book or pamphlet in preparing his draft. He did not regard it as part of his charge to invent new ideas or to offer sentiments that had not been heard before, only to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to make. This was to be an expression of the American mind.

Earlier in the month Jefferson had set down his ideas for a desirable government for Virginia and had sent these to his old teacher, George Wythe. In a preamble to that paper he had compiled a list of charges against George III, and he drew upon them now in the second-floor parlor of Graff’s house. Before June 28 he copied a four-page rough draft from notes he had been making, showed it to Adams and Franklin, who gave him a few suggestions, and then presented it to the full committee. On July 1 Congress returned to the resolution submitted by Lee and the familiar arguments went on for hours in the sultry chamber, with Dickinson speaking carefully and at length for delay, Adams and others urging action. South Carolina and Pennsylvania, when the roll was called, opposed independence; Delaware’s delegation was split; New York abstained. During the long summer evening and into the night the radicals worked feverishly to persuade the hesitant and the moderate, and the next day, when Congress reassembled, they were cheered by the sudden arrival of Caesar Rodney of Delaware. Rodney—whom John Adams declared the oddest-looking man in the world, tall and slender as a reed—had ridden eighty miles from his home in Dover through the thunderous, rainy night to swing Delaware’s vote for independence. South Carolina’s members changed their minds and Pennsylvania’s Robert Morris and John Dickinson absented themselves, making it possible for that colony to vote in the affirmative. When New York abstained once again, Congress voted unanimously for independence on July 2—a day the ecstatic John Adams said ought to be commemorated as the moment of deliverance, solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward, forevermore. But the declaration itself was yet to be approved, and the members—to Jefferson’s dismay—began to take a hand in rewording it. As they went over every phrase, deleting unnecessary words here and there and eliminating—at the insistence of South Carolina and Georgia—one of the most eloquent passages, an attack on the slave trade, Jefferson writhed silently, comforted only partially by John Adams’ stout defense of the document on the floor and by Benjamin Franklin’s quiet relation of a homely anecdote. The wise old Pennsylvanian told Jefferson, in an aside, about a hatter who was opening a shop and wanted a signboard for it. What the new proprietor had in mind was a message reading, John Thompson, Hatter, makes and sells hats for ready money, but one of his friends suggested that the word hatter was superfluous. Another told him that no buyer would care who made the